Australia Highseas

This stretch of sea lies off the northwest coast of Western Australia, where the Indian Ocean washes a long, low shore of sand beaches, mudflats and red cliffs. Strong tides sweep the shallow coast, and the dry season brings steady winds and clear water.

Aboriginal peoples had lived along this coast for tens of thousands of years, fishing the reefs and tidal flats and trading along its shore. Trepang fishermen from Makassar began visiting the northern coasts around the middle of the eighteenth century. European ships saw it only from the sea: Dutch captains in the seventeenth century, and William Dampier, who in 1688 beached his ship near King Sound and in 1699 sailed the coast in HMS Roebuck.